OLJ 3: Delicious and saving your bookmarks.

We will be using Delicious through the duration of the subject. It will provide you with a platform on which you will be able to store and share relevant online materials throughout the subject and beyond into other subjects, or professional and personal activities.

Use the Help feature to learn about how to set up a network linking your account to others. Add the usernames, ‘SISsocialmedia’ and ‘lyn_hay’ to your account, and if you find any great resources which you think others in INF506 will like, please share these using the ‘for:sissocialmedia’ tag.

Get started – go out and tag a few resources!

If you wish to use this task as one of your three (3) OLJ tasks for Assignment 2, you will need to write a short evaluation (no more than 350 words) of your use of Delicious as a social bookmarking tool – include a critical evaluation of the effectiveness of different features and/or functions, as well as a brief statement on the different ways an information organisation may be able to utilise Delicious to support information services, learning and/or collaboration of users and/or employees.

I have been using delicious for a 3 years now to save bookmarks in the cloud. I found this useful as I was often working on several different computers and needed to be able to access links from any of them. To add and access links is simple, and you are able to write over 1000 characters in description, so I can add details such as why I chose to save this site, a brief overview of it so I can be reminded of its content or to type in the information about the website in APA bibliographical form. I also appreciate the statistic of seeing how many other people have bookmarked a certain page. This statistic can infer how well respected or used a site is.

For this degree I have kept links in two places, on my OLJ and in Delicious. It is far easier to find the links in Delicious. This is both to do with the layout of the links page and its use of tagging. The tagging on delicious is simple to do. Certain sites have suggested tags, as well as letting you make up your own, so you can use the tagging as a Folksonomy (Vanderwal 2007). The use of tags makes searching also very easy, similar to using a Keyword search on a library catalogue. This allows you to search for similar websites, in this way you can use Delicious to “Filter Up” (Harris 2009) information, finding the best examples, this can be done by looking at the number count, or by following peoples whose judgement you trust.

The Following and stacks features of delicious I had not used before INF506. It is very useful for links which need to be shared by a whole group or for following a specific person or group. Links could be shared in a manner similar to a libguide, or within a class as a list of resources. This is given an extra dimension in that within a group people can add more links, or comment on the usefulness of already shared links, allowing for critical evaluation of information, and the adding of new information, making the group links a living document. The Stacks feature seems quite similar to other social networking news sights, such as Buzzfeed or Tumblr, in that the links are presented in a similar manner, even if only on a certain topic. The Stacks feature is a new feature, only added since the creators of Youtube purchased Delicious from yahoo(Gilbertson 2011)

The searching, tagging and following features are what differentiates Delicious from just saving your bookmarks all in one place. They can be shared, transported and accessed from anywhere in an efficient manner, and comments may be left, creating conversation and collaboration.